"Retconning" History.

"Retconning" is a term of art used in the comic book geek community as shorthand for "retroactive continuiity."  "Retroactive continuity" is the device used to keep a comic book character's current status consistent with his past. For example, Captain America is perennially 30 years old, which would impossible with his being defrosted from the polar ice in 1963, as was the case when Cap made his first appearance.  So, the pragmatic strategy is simply to ignore the original versions of the story, and "retcon" Cap's discovery as occurring later and later.

Here is a fascinating example of "retconning" by leftist journalists who need to make the modern story line that Republicans have always been southern racists consistent with, you know, historical facts.

MSNBC identifies George Wallace as a Republican.



The Ministry of Truth couldn't retcon any better than MSNBC.

The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan...

....the Republicans.


The "retcon" project continues, notwithstanding the - 'ow you say - facts.

Here's another bit of cognitive dissonance for the retcon project:

HEY, THAT’S NOT THE NARRATIVE! Democrats Facing Diversity Drought.

Come January, Republicans will have at least as many minority senators as Democrats and will have four minority governors to Democrats’ one.
The Senate appointment of Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and the death of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) on Monday mean that, at least for now, the GOP will have three incoming minority senators, and Democrats will have two or three (depending on who is appointed to Inouye’s seat, though it seems likely to be another minority candidate).
For whatever reason, the GOP is doing a better job of cultivating minority candidates for major statewide office these days. But why? The answer isn’t simple, but a big reason for it is actually a law that was designed to help minorities: The Voting Rights Act. . . . In fact, the National Journal reported that Democrats elected just six minorities to majority-white districts and states in 2010. And they actually had fewer minorities elected to such offices than Republicans did.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, the WSJ notes the Democratic/Media narrative failure here:

Mr. Scott will become the Senate’s lone black member and the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction. The GOP will no doubt enjoy having a high-profile black politician to assist in minority outreach. But it’s also worth noting that Mr. Scott is a favorite of the tea party activists whom Democrats and liberals have tried to dismiss as bigots. Two years ago, the NAACP passed a resolution condemning “racist elements and activities” in the tea party. The civil rights group also issued a report that accused the movement of giving a “platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.”
The popularity of other black tea party heroes like Herman Cain and Florida Congressman Allen West should have been enough to put this nonsense to rest. But now that this supposedly “racist” grass-roots movement is partly responsible for the Senate’s only black member come January, be assured that the media will set about refuting these baseless accusations.
That was a joke.

Yes, it was.

Stop the liberal retcon.

The word of the day is "retcon":

Retroactive continuity (retcon for short)[1] is the alteration of previously established facts in a fictional work.[2] Retcons are done for many reasons, including the accommodation of sequels or further derivative works in a series, wherein newer authors or creators want to revise the in-story history to allow a course of events that would not have been possible in the story's original continuity. Other reasons might be the reintroduction of popular characters, resolution of errors in chronology, the updating of a familiar series for modern audiences, or simplification of an excessively complex continuity structure.

Words have a way of crystallizing ideas, and until we have the idea we cannot reason about facts.

One fact is the way that Republicans are now being depicted as the party of racism.

Yes, the party that was created to end slavery and passed the Civil Rights Act is routinely derided as "racist," as the Democrats - the party of slavery and segregation and the Ku Klux Klan - have somehow slid that history onto the Republicans.

The word for this is "retcon." The Democrats have engaged in the Orwellian practice of "retroactive continuity" by making their past fit how they see their present.

At Pajama Media Ed Driscoll expands on this "retcon" idea:

One of the leitmotifs of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is the shell game that “progressives” (more on the scare quotes in a few moments) use to transfer bad decisions of progressives and liberals of the past to American history as a whole. FDR’s decision to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II? America’s shame. Eugenics? It was embraced wholeheartedly (and then some) by such early progressives as Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and John Maynard Keynes. And was rejected wholesale by the Catholic Church and religious conservatives such as G.K. Chesterton. Despite that, as Jonah notes in Liberal Fascism, quoting Yale historian and professor of surgery Sherwin Nuland, Nuland and other writers at the New Republic and similar left-wing publications are convinced that “Eugenics was a creed that appealed to social conservatives, who were pleased to blame poverty and crime on heredity.”

JFK’s death in 1963, by a lone Capital-C Communist? America’s collective racist shame. In 2004, John Kerry tried to pass the buck on the Vietnam War from LBJ to Nixon. And on and on.

What a strange Orwellian strategy.